What Is the Funny Little Magazine Mentioned in Breakfast at Tiffanys
B reakfast at Tiffany'due south was a sacred film in my household growing up. My mother's VHS tape, fuzzily recorded off Telly, was plastered in "practice not tape over" warning labels, a defence I might have to explain to someone born 10 years after than I was. The opening credits on this worn copy were briefly disrupted with footage from the 1988 Wimbledon men'south concluding – withal overlaid, in an altogether lovely technological blip, with the wistful strains of Henry Mancini'southward Moon River theme. The warning labels dated from shortly after this unfortunate, swiftly aborted overlap.
I thus grew up thinking of Breakfast at Tiffany's as a picture that belonged – via the tape, in a nigh literal and physical sense – specifically to one person. And so, by extension, to me, as a kind of inheritance. We watched information technology many times in my childhood, when I was rather too young to understand what exactly Manhattan socialite Holly Golightly did with her life – though, in my defence, the picture rather sidesteps the issue too. No matter: it was probably 1 of my offset encounters with pure flick star power, or at least ane of the start times I recognised it as such. Audrey Hepburn, so perfectly doe-eyed and beehived and brightly funny and winsomely pitiful, seemed every bit much to me a forcefulness of magic as Julie Andrews in Mary Poppins and The Sound of Music, fifty-fifty if the person she was playing made less sense to me. And non least of all – probably most of all, if I'grand existence honest – at that place was a cat. Cats were a cheap and easy way to my heart in a moving-picture show: the whiplash of panic and relief I felt over the rash disposal and cute retrieval of Holly'southward ginger mog returns to me every time I watch it withal.
All of which is to say that Blake Edwards' essentially modest romantic one-act became for me one of those strange texts by which y'all mark your own shifts in understanding and perspective. Every few years it looked a niggling different: a dour undertow appeared in Holly'due south jolly everyday carousel of parties and suitors, as did the poignant aspirationalism of her morning window-shopping walks. The film may undersell the irony and subtle sorrow of Truman Capote'south source novella – reading that, also, makes the pic forever play differently – but its between-the-lines residual of bitter to sweet, likewise, tastes different with age. (I understood, also, why nosotros usually fast-forwarded through Mickey Rooney's yellowface scenes as Holly's crotchety Japanese landlord: I had thought them merely an unfunny diversion, though they were certainly that too.)
With the movie at present lx, and me virtually twoscore, my affection for it endures – despite the ways in which it softens and compromises Capote's sharper, tarter character study, or mayhap because of them. It is perhaps 1 of the great Hollywood examples of good literary adaptation yielding a fresh gift altogether, rather than a faithful, secondary evocation. The film's sweetened love story between two (admittedly very pretty) social outliers – one a guarded extrovert, the other a author trying to cleft the globe around him – may exist aught similar Capote'due south more detached, unromantic portrait of a woman lonely in her crowded social whirl, aiming to draw different emotions from its audience entirely. Simply there's still a tender kind of truth to its sentimentality, and a heartsore vulnerability to Hepburn's trivial-girl-lost functioning that cuts through the platitude of that very description.
Every bit a rural midwesterner whose on-loan uptown chic is a well-wrought disguise, assisting her escape from a life and marriage without gamble, Hepburn'southward Holly Golightly is a kind of exaggerated emblem of who we all become – at to the lowest degree for a time – when we move abroad from abode and accept the freedom to reintroduce ourselves to the earth. You lot can encounter why Capote, who lobbied the studio to cast Marilyn Monroe in the part, was unhappy with Hepburn's casting: there is no part of her, fifty-fifty buried deep within, that speaks of middle America. But as the performed it-girl Holly, gradually losing track of her past selves, she's both movingly frail – we'd get her wounded wanderlust even if she hadn't been handed Moon River to sing in a perfect spotlight scene, but information technology doesn't hurt – and irresistibly spritzy. Decades later, her performance stands as a kind of manic pixie dreamgirl prototype, well before that stock graphic symbol was overwhelmed and infantilised with hyper-quirkiness.
Meanwhile, whatever the picture's kissing-in-the-rain happy ending might say, she remains a romantic heroine primarily defined by wilful independence: information technology's significant, and perhaps even appropriate, that Hepburn's leading man (the perfectly likable George Peppard, some years before grizzled A-Team renown) wasn't remotely on her level of glory or luminosity. Y'all can trace her DNA through an assortment of single (or singular) women in New York in film and TV, from Annie Hall to Carrie Bradshaw to Frances Ha: she'due south scarcely like whatsoever of them, of course, but you tin solidly bet on all those characters having seen Breakfast at Tiffany's at some point, and fostered dreams of their own Holly Golightly reinvention.
It's what makes Holly, and Hepburn's reading of her, worthy of the much-abused tag "iconic" – more so, for better or worse, than Capote's more barbed creation. She may indeed be more icon than character at this point, her signature piffling black apparel, updo and cigarette holder now a recognised code – and costume – for cosmopolitan urban femininity even among people who accept never seen Breakfast at Tiffany'due south. Likewise, not anybody who continues to stick the film's instantly recognisable poster, with its multi-coloured edge and magazine-style illustration, on their dorm-room wall is necessarily a fan of the moving-picture show. It instead stands for an abstract nostalgia – not for lived experience, merely the glamour of a by life – even amidst people besides young to call up Deep Bluish Something's yowling indie-pop ear worm Breakfast at Tiffany'southward, gradually and thankfully receding in the film's cultural legacy.
It's hard to think of many films that have been so extensively broken downwardly into enduring images and echoing symbology, quite independently of its own fandom. Turns out young me was quite incorrect, any the aura of that scratchy VHS tape: at 60, it turns out, Breakfast at Tiffany's sort of belongs to anybody, whether they know it or not.
Source: https://www.theguardian.com/film/2021/oct/05/breakfast-at-tiffanys-at-60-the-sharp-romcom-that-grows-darker-with-age